Our hope is for this network to be a vibrant, active community with participants contributing regularly and engaging with one another in meaningful and life-giving ways. This can certainly be challenging enough in local community spaces, let alone digital ones. We have ingrained habits of how we interact in social media spaces. We often gravitate toward the familiar, and we hardly recognize the impacts of the social architecture built by the websites we frequent. While new technology can sometimes be confusing and intimidating, it can also offer deeper means of connection.

Slack is a wonderful team space/social media platform that facilitates dialogue and collaboration, doesn’t data harvest, and offers users the ability to co-create their own structures for communication. We want to be very intentional about how we cultivate and use this space in hopes of significant connection.

If you wish to join this space, we do ask that you adhere the to following guidelines:

1. Community over content.

This is a space for connection, to support and engage in dialogue much more than it is a space for information dissemination. We all have sources for personal development, and while there is a place for sharing—it far too easily overtakes online social spaces.

We encourage personal engagement over content engagement.

2.Collaboration over promotion.

We all believe in our work and our creations. Sharing these with the broader world is important. However, this is a space for collaborators more than followers. Our questions for this space are about how others can help in the development of integral expressions and forms, rather than how to expand reach.

We encourage co-creation over self-promotion.

3. Application over theory.

The intricacies of integral theory and its application to Christianity are certainly engaging and intriguing. Thought development in this field is crucial, but we hope for this space to be more focused on how we are each trying to implement and embody aspects of the theory in form rather than debate the finer points of cognitive understanding.

We encourage discussion of practical expression over philosophizing.

4. Consciousness over cruising.

Many people use “social media” spaces in different ways. This is not a “media” space—something to be consumed—as much as it is a community. We come to this space for active participation rather than consumption. That means we emphasize conscious engagement with regular contributions of personal thought and experience.